Polycrystalline silicon, or polysilicon as it is alternately referred to, is receiving much attention for many silicon devices. Typical applications of polysilicon can be found in the Anderson U.S. Pat. No. 3,370,980 issued Feb. 27, 1968; the Bean et al U.S. Pat. No. 3,519,901 issued July 7, 1970; the Smith U.S. Pat. No. 3,811,076 issued May 14, 1974; the Garnache U.S. Pat. No. 3,841,926 issued Oct. 15, 1974; the Lesk U.S. Pat. No. 3,900,345 issued Aug. 19, 1975; the Joshi et al U.S. Pat. No. 4,123,300 issued Oct. 31, 1978; the Wada et al article "Grain Growth Mechanism of Heavily Phosphorus-Implanted Polycrystalline Silicon", pp. 1499-1504, J. Electrochem. Soc.: Solid State Technology, Vol. 125, No. 9, September 1978; the Sunami article "Thermal Oxidation of Phosphorus-Doped Polycrystalline Silicon in Wet Oxygen", pp. 892-97, J. Electrochem. Soc.: Solid-State Science and Technology, Vol. 125, No. 6, June 1978; The Abbas article "FET Integrated Circuit Having Two Polysilicon Layers", pp. 3022-23, IBM-TDB, Vol. 15, No. 10, March 1973; the Fowler article "Reduction of Leakage in SiO.sub.2 Grown on Silicon Films", p. 1615, IBM-TDB, Vol. 18, No. 5, October 1975; and the Irene article "Method to Avoid the Polysilicon Film Tearing Mechanism", p. 4961, IBM-TDB, Vol. 20, No. 11B, April 1978.
Polysilicon films have growing importance in the semiconductor fabrication art, particularly in the silicon gate technology which is employed in the fabrication of many MOS integrated circuits. In this technology, silicon dioxide films have been grown as intermediate insulators for double or higher level polysilicon devices for CCDs and random access memories. For another related application see the V. L. Rideout article "Double Polysilicon Dynamic Memory Cell With Polysilicon Bit Line", pp. 3828-31, IBM-TDB, Vol. 21, No. 9, February 1979. However, this technology has encountered inter-polysilicon layer shorts (in the double polysilicon process) which constitutes one of the major yield detractors in the resultant semiconductor devices. Until recently it has been believed that the quality of silicon oxides grown on the polysilicon gates governed the reliability of these devices.